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Thread: slang vs spanglish

 
  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fresno22
    I heard a teenager tell her boyfriend this: "Hey, Dame una quebrada!"
    Meaning "give me a break" !!! (accent on the "a" in Dame)
    Literal Spanglish translation and sounds very funny...
    But, how would you translate "give me a break" into Spanish?
    Maybe: something like "Dejame en paz?" Realmente ni idea...
    "Give me a break" is similar to "cut me some slack" --don't take things so seriously...pardon me..Wow!....it's my native language and I can't think of how to get the point across without using one of those 2 expressions. Perhaps, show me some consideration...as in: "Mija, you haven't cleaned your room for a week!"
    "Hey mom, show me some consideration, I've been studying for finals all week."
    Or, FAR more common, "Give me (Gimme) a break, I've been studying for finals all week."
    Any ideas??
    Thanks

    How about old reliable: "Are you (you gotta be) kidding!!!"

    or "Are you serious?!" or "Get real!".
    vicente

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    Es un hilo muy interesante! Es fascinante ver la evolución de los idiomas pero hay que tomar en cuenta que casi todos los idiomas "prestan" palabras de otros, que Spanglish no es la única mezcla (estoy pensando en "Portuñol") y si la finalidad de un idioma es comunicar una idea nada más, para los que hablan "Spanglish", el idioma cumple con tal fin. Los ejemplos que uds. dieron son muy buenos...me encanta lo de "la quebrada"!!

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    But, how would you translate "give me a break" into Spanish?
    Here in Cuba we would say something like:

    Dame un chance.
    Dame un respiro.
    or something like "Suéltame" but this is not something to tell to a boyfriend...you don't really want him to let go, unless you really want him to.
    but we could also say something like (and this is the translation for "take it easy")
    Cógelo con calma.
    ...cause at the end if "you take it easy", "you also give me a break"...
    Realmente, el destino del mundo depende, en primer lugar, de los estadistas y, en segundo lugar, de los intérpretes.
    Trygve Halvdan Lie

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    Senior Member lauracipolla's Avatar
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    Default Re: slang vs spanglish

    A los traductores no nos gusta, ¡digámoslo de una vez! Queremos que el español se mantenga puro y el inglés también. Pero... ¿podemos o debemos hacer algo para desterrar el spanglish o detener su avance? Y además... ¿es tan malo que exista? ¿Y qué es, en definitiva: un idioma nuevo, un dialecto, o simple slang? Los hijos de nuestros hijos, de todas partes de Latinoamérica y de los Estados Unidos también, seguramente se reirán de nuestros miedos de hoy y comentarán (en spanglish, seguro) lo que ahora ignoramos, suponemos e imaginamos...

    Los invito a volver a pensar un poco más sobre este tema, desde una perspectiva un poco más seria que este post, aunque no es que no me hayan divertido los ejemplos de ustedes, ¿eh? Y los mencioné en mi blog Spanglish: el futuro tan temido, donde me puse a investigar un poco y encontré interesantes definiciones, explicaciones y opiniones a favor y en contra del spanglish.

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    Default Re: slang vs spanglish

    There's no stopping Spanglish. It's out there and no one is going to be able to stop it. We might as well embrace it as yet another way that living languages grow. Speakers of English and Spanish and all languages definitely deserve a good education including knowledge about how the languages they speak are put together, but if that could be accomplished (not likely) it still wouldn't erase Spanglish or stop its development.

    I prefer to embrace the change, and try to understand it. Languages are fascinating because they live and grow and change and intermingle.

  6. #16
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    Default Re: slang vs spanglish

    Laura Lei tu post, y a mi mente cayeron un monton de ejemplos mas......ahora ya no estamos de rebajas ahora estamos On SALE!
    No tenemos mas tragos dos por uno tenemos Happy Hour!
    El domingo pasado escuche un relator de futbol decir "el arquero tomo la pelota con la Hands!"
    En algunos sectores sociales podria interpretarlo como aspiraciones a un determinado status de vida, copiar modelos de cultura extranjera y esto ya no se convierte en un intercambio cultural sino q todo lo contrario empezamos por el desapego, el destierro de terminados términos q son propios de cada pais o de cada idioma.
    Ultimamente hasta miramos con asombro cuando escuchamos algun término en ingles mal pronunciado pero no nos preocupamos por enriquecer nuestro vocabulario.
    No veo mal la incorporacion de palabras extranjeras a nuestra lengua madre pero tampoco exageremos.

  7. #17
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    Default Re: slang vs spanglish

    It might seem to some that "Spanglish" is relatively new but far from it. It certainly is more widespread and has a name now but the practice of incorporating Spanish words (and murdering the pronuciation) into English and English words into Spanish has been happening for hundreds of years.

    I have to disagree with Laura. I don't think that English speakers are concerned about keeping English "pure". We have always been open to "borrowing" words. I think Spanglish scares native Spanish speakers who want to protect their "mother tongue" from corruption far more than it bothers anybody else.

    It is part of everyday life in some parts of the US. We have generations of bi-lingual people who grew up in Florida, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona speaking both languages.

    My wife's family members are fourth or fifth generation Mexican-Americans who have lived on the Mexican-U.S. border forever and if you listen to their conversations you will hear a mixture of English/Spanish and many Spanglish terms. Some of the older folks still speak Spanish as their first language and some of them prefer English and they all mix the two at times. They use whichever word first comes to mind or the one that best fits what they want to say and they have been doing that for decades and decades, long before anybody ever thought to call it Spanglish.

    Sometimes we have problems right here in this forum finding the right word, the best translation, to describe what we want to say. That's not a problem in the real world for people who are not worried about mixing the two languages. For the most part they simply use the English word. Spanish, for all its beauty, does not have the wide variety of words to describe things in the same detail as can be done in English, at least, not to the average speaker. Example: camioneta=small truck, suv, station wagon, pickup. van, mini-van, etc. To my knowledge, there are no specific words for these vehicles individually in Latin America. If there are, they are not well known, so if I am trying to say I own a Ford pickup I have to say "pickup" because "camioneta" does not tell you which Ford product I'm talking about.

    I don't understand the fears that some people have about Spanglish. It is not going to destroy Spanish in Spain or Argentina or Cuba or Mexico and it is certainly not going to destroy English. It's all about communication and if it helps facilitate understanding then what's wrong with it?
    vicente

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    Default Re: slang vs spanglish

    Quote Originally Posted by vicente
    (...) I have to disagree with Laura.
    Nothing urges me more to reply than "I have to disagree with Laura" from my good friend... (hahahaha. Private joke! Vicente and I love a good disagreement!) Seriously, your opinion is really valuable, V, because you're "there"! And it's also true that those of us with Latin blood in our veins (Argentinians, for example) always feel the need to "defend" what's ours, more or less vehemently.

    Quote Originally Posted by vicente
    (2)
    (...) Spanish, for all its beauty, does not have the wide variety of words to describe things in the same detail as can be done in English, at least, not to the average speaker.
    I should say now I have to STRONGLY disagree with you, and I'm sure someone else will say so... Spanish is truly beautiful, but English has its own beauty, too! They're just DIFFERENT, and used differently.

    What I've been told is it's not a question of variety, but of specificity. English has more words to describe tangible things in technical or commercial fields, but there's not so much to work with in the fields of Philosophy and Metaphysics... So it's not a question of how many more words each language has, but of WHAT we use the words to talk about. So they say.

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    Default Re: slang vs spanglish

    Nothing urges me more to reply than "I have to disagree with Laura" from my good friend... (hahahaha. Private joke! Vicente and I love a good disagreement!)
    Hahaha...Always fun, mi amiga!


    Seriously, your opinion is really valuable, V, because you're "there"! And it's also true that those of us with Latin blood in our veins (Argentinians, for example) always feel the need to "defend" what's ours, more or less vehemently.
    Well, I think part of why we so readily accept Spanglish in the U.S. is that we have nothing that is "ours" to protect. We have no cultural or language history. We got English from the Brits, although lord knows they don't speak it very well, and our "culture", such as it is, is a mixture of cultures from all over the world.

    In the case of language, we are not interested in the beauty of English (a questionable notion at best) but in its utilitarianism. We tend to refine things down to the most practicable and usable form and don't worry about whether some stuffy organization is going to disagree in the manner that the RAE monitors Spanish.
    Last edited by vicente; 02-03-2010 at 03:21 PM.
    vicente

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    Default Re: slang vs spanglish

    I think the point is that there is nothing you can do to stop or erase Spanglish. It is inevitable. There just isn't much point in railing against it. As people who love languages, we can respect that languages evolve in ways that we have no control over and we can respect that languages are alive and are constantly influenced by the environment. It's the very nature of language. It has been that way forever. We can embrace the change, study it, try to understand it, and enjoy it. In fact, we should celebrate that our languages are living, evolving, growing, changing.

    Lamenting Spanglish is like complaining about the weather or wishing the waves wouldn't change the shoreline.

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